I never thought of myself as showing up in kind of the cloud telephony telecom world. But I think there's an immense problem and opportunity to solve for how do you power voice video messaging across any device, anywhere in the world. And then I think the biggest opportunity really gets into this, this, this idea of the future: How do we start to automate workflows and help businesses understand what's happening in these conversations? To me, it's really why I'm in this space and, you know, why we were building talk IQ is I think that's a bigger market than power and communications.
Dan O'Connell, former founder and CEO of TalkIQ which was acquired by Dialpad, discusses the future of cloud communications. Dan's vision for helping teams sell more with less churn led to Dialpad becoming a unicorn last year having raised $100M at a $1.2B pre-money valuation. Exceptional investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures are betting on Dialpad's ability to convert legacy telephony infrastructure into cloud-native, SaaS systems using AI to analyze voice transcripts.
Listen and learn...
- Dan's entrepreneurial journey from incubator to launch to fundraising to acquisition.
- Why TalkIQ was really three startups in one... and how Dan navigated his team through the process of finding one big customer problem to fix.
- Why voice will soon be the primary computing interface.
- The challenges of developing NLP technology for voice transcription and AI-based analytics.
- What Dan learned from nearly a decade at Google... and, more important, what he learned not to do.
References in the episode...